Ed/Tech must-reads

What factors contribute to higher grades in a first-year undergraduate management unit: an exploratory study at an Australian university from Higher Education Research & Development

The wealth of data about students that we now have access to - some would say excess of data - means that we can poke and prod at a wide range of factors in a bid to predict which might influence their probability of success. Purkayastha and Huber (USyd) examined a cohort of 990 first year business students to see what matters in terms of tutors, course loads, engagement with technology and individual student factors. In spite of widely held beliefs, they didn’t find that engagement with the LMS or discussion forum had a statistically significant impact, but tutor qualifications and gender, student age, entry score and tutorial attendance did. This is a rich exploration about what happens in a student’s learning experience.

Learning Design Meetup online: Finding leadership pathways in the wilds of learning design | Tuesday 31 October, 1pm AEDT from LX at UTS & TELedvisors Network webinar

Learning designers need to drive change in their work. What skills do they need for this? How do they get them? Join our online discussion with guests Tam Nguyen (UNSW), Amanda Lizier (UTS) and Kelly Pattison (Circular Learning) for some lively insights. This session is open to all.

Setting the curve 5 – navigating technology adoption in the academic community from Wonkhe.

This entire series of Setting the curve posts on Wonkhe is impressive but I am specifically calling this one out for Jo Midgley’s (UWE Bristol) refreshingly clear appreciation of the fact that rolling out a piece of ed tech (in this case for learning analytics) is only the first step in the process and that new tech alone is not the answer to problems that so many leaders seem to think it will be. ”Implementation doesn’t lead to adoption, data doesn’t mean insight, and intervention doesn’t mean impact. Technology needs to be part of a systematic, strategic solution to challenges – which means that the goal is not to roll out a system but to, for example, improve retention and success by targeting and supporting less engaged students. The rollout of the system needs to be thought through and resourced – responsibility at UWE Bristol for managing the engagement analytics system sits with a central support team – but the success of the strategy will ultimately come down to whether academic and professional colleagues, and by extension students, understand why it’s being adopted, and what that means for how they engage with it.”

Empowering Learners.ai online conference (free) from Global Research Alliance for AI in Learning and Education (GRAILE) (Starts TODAY)

I signed up for this weeks ago and then promptly forgot to share it. This looks like a massive AI in education event, organised by George Siemens’ GRAILE organisation. A lot of the sessions are even at Australia-friendly times.

Covering questions like:

• What’s actually happening with AI and how is it changing classrooms, teaching, and learning?

• How can data, analytics and AI be used not to disempower or automate work, but to empower learners and professionals?

• How must modern knowledge systems (such as schools, universities, corporate training and development, government agencies) change to prepare people for an AI society?

• How to track and assess the qualities that equip people for this future?

• What will the learning ecosystem look like by 2030 and what might humans and AI collaborate in solving complex problems?